


keep your demons tied

by verulams (finnlogan)



Series: 2015 yognonsense [4]
Category: The Yogscast
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, But its meaner than that, Canon-Typical Behavior, Canon-Typical Violence, Clones, Dark, Gen, POV Second Person, Technically this has:, Yoglabs, and
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-16
Updated: 2020-04-16
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:55:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,336
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23684248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/finnlogan/pseuds/verulams
Summary: UNFINISHED SNIPPET from 2015***The walls of containment loom above you like pillars and towers that you remember only vaguely from a childhood lost to you, just like your present as about to be. Your present was so old it was ancient history, a spaceman and a dwarf at his side walking the earth and saving souls left and right. Fighting forever.Not forever.But you are nothing if not persistent.
Series: 2015 yognonsense [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1705456
Kudos: 5





	keep your demons tied

The walls of containment loom above you like pillars and towers that you remember only vaguely from a childhood lost to you, just like your present was about to be. Your present was so old it was ancient history, a spaceman and a dwarf at his side walking the earth and saving souls left and right. Fighting forever. 

Not forever.

But you are nothing if not persistent. (In a faraway voice, a little whisper snarls something iron, and braids your best friend's beard as they both sit by a lake.) Freezing people had not been your forte before right this very moment. But your friend slips back into the ice, so you make it so. You’d always been good at picking stuff up (skills, your friends, yourself- really you make a very boring person, because you spend your whole life fixing things, not making new ones).

Snapping to alert, you turn and run around the back of the panel, and claw desperately at the board covering the circuit. Honeydew hadn’t been prepped for cloning; covered in germs and death and probably hamster fur, for fucks sake- and his blood wasn’t right, too hot and not cool enough, without the formaldehyde solution and crushingly, crushingly alive- so it would do more than freeze him, it’d kill him. YogLabs had never done things by halves and the temperature had always been as cold as they could get it without causing Brain Death but that would just straight up murder him-

Unless you were lucky.

You’d made a business out of being lucky. 

(Being lucky and making questionable government contracts, yep. That was your business.)

Rip at the dial and switch it right down and try not to tear a wire- Run to the screen and check the brain activity-

_is he alive is he alive is he alive-_

How are you meant to tell? ... You have to respawn him. Slam the button. Don’t breathe as the machine powers up and the clone- your friend- blinks and seems to squirm. Christ. This hurts, more than it probably should for a man in control of an evil organisation. 

“Be with you soon, friend.”

Patting the machine and hoping, you drag your feet as you walk to your own clone. He reminds you too much of a past you can’t remember. Of falling from warped metal, and space- Of ‘Commander’, of ‘Captain’, and red planets under strange suns.

Just dreams, now, though.

Your clone looks like you in every way. Scruffy beard and hair and though his eyes are squeezed tight shut you know they are the same- He wears your colours, your sword is at his side and the insignia is stamped across the same metal. He’s you, but dead. And isn’t that a chilling thought.

Breathe, one, two. Breathe, one, two. And from the bay at the back, out stumbles your friend. “Hello?”

But he looks at you with no recognition and you glance over at the vat to confirm that he’s still alive before you look back. This dwarf, the one with wide eyes but a stern, not quite scared frown- he’s your friend’s body. But it doesn’t stop you from drawing your gun and killing him anyway.

(He lies crumpled on the floor and you won’t demand that testificates clean away his corpse for weeks.)

You slam the button once more, this time panting and sweating. He won’t respawn again. Your clone seems to frown but you snarl at it. “What would be _the point?”_

(It’s not frowning. Later you realise he’d been crying.)

“What would the point _be_?”

So you sit, and stare. For as long as it took. It doesn’t take that long. You leave and hold the fort because you had to and then when that’s done you come back, eventually spawning a new set and letting one of your own clones teach them existence. There's always more than one of you, not like the other with their singular selves, because you need to be in at least five places at once at all times. And you always come back, and stare at Honeydew’s clone before you move on to your own.

You always, always do. There is no escaping, no freedom. You always, always do.

You start to go mad. “See- the thing is- Who made _you_ king?” You press dirty fingers to the frosted glass. “Who made you king?” 

It is not as if you had chosen. It had been thrust upon you and you had acted. You had taken an opportunity, made use of that expanding skill-set of yours and your connections- and yet here you were. You’re on your knees before you know it and once more it becomes hideously crushingly obvious that this really is all your fault.

You could have saved him, killed that fucking traitor well before he’d struck Honeydew and you had known it. But you hadn’t moved. And you don’t know why.

You could have saved him and you could have saved yourself and you could have done a lot of things with his help or without it.

But you didn’t.

So you stand and dust yourself off. You finger the metal insignia you’d ripped off your old uniform. You keep it in your pocket and you breathe a little heavier, but a little more human with it there- _alien._ You have to remind yourself. Not human, never human.) You keep moving. Again.

(This time it’s different. The change of it all is tangible, thick in the air, salty and heavy and disgustingly dark.) Walking back to your office, your shoes click and clack and the double doors make perilous noises as you pass through them. Out, away from the clones- you stop to look at them before you go and find yourself perversely happy that they exist- and into the stairwell, where thousands of feet had trodden, only to find their journey at an end when they stood in front of their case. 

There had been a few memorable cases- Alsmiffy had brought fire and ice then absolutely refused to freeze. Sjin had brought clothes lined with TNT and Rythian had screamed and flashed through his chamber for weeks. You’d made a note to investigate that. Several of those clones still screamed now.

Duncan had walked calmly and met your eyes with a touch of pity, and a wry, greasy grin.

“Doesn’t do good things to you, does it, Xephos?” You’d grimaced and asked what he’d meant. “Power,” he said, and you locked him in forever, more viciously than you’d intended.

(It’s the first clone of him, the one with all the madness and viciousness but none of his control, that becomes your personal executioner.) But today they stand calmly and do not seem to hold any grudge. Even the strange green man, Alsmiffy, does not stir today, as he occasionally did. It had been difficult to keep him under, possibly due to the fact that he seemed to lack veins.

But you don’t care. You’d run your tests and there’s nothing left you can do. 

He wakes up and stares at you, just the once. He’d scowled, and then tried to reach out to his friends before you managed to get him back under. Trottimus and- the other one, with an unpronounceable name that matched the other two’s ridiculous features as little as it matched his own normal face, had been placed close, only because it seemed to ease capture when they were near.

He’d sighed as you decreased the temperature and flooded the chamber with formaldehyde, but he scowled when you caught eyes with him. You make every effort to forget about him. You leave the stairs and move to push open the doors-

Deep breath, Xephos. Deep breath.

-and then you’re in, walking steadily forward as the man in the cage below stares at you.

You walk faster, because there’s only a little time before- “...X-Xeph-oss...?” But then you stop. Because he doesn’t usually remember your name. You turn.

His eyes are brighter now, sicker, and a little less clear than before. “X-Xeph-oss!” 

“Hello, friend.” And as he stands to move closer to the glass, you do too.

“Xeph-oss, I dun, remember-“

“I know, friend. It’s okay.”

But it’s not. Because the thing is, Lalna has never remembered before, and if that meant that other clones could remember, then that meant an awful lot of not-okay things.

He blinks up at you.

“Xeph-oss, the war, with, Si-Jinn and Ryth-an, did I win, are they oh-kayy, did I-” And his eyes, god forbid, fill with _tears_. “Did people get loss-t like lass-t time?”

“No, Lalna. Everyone is fine. How much do you remember?” And you, crouching with your palm to the glass with obvious lies and the crackle of the intercom, do little to disguise Lalna’s emotions.

Emotions that he hadn’t had before the cloning. Tap, Tap. Tap, Tap. You squint through the glass where his head hangs down and his face is in his hands as he crouches at the edge.

“...Lalna?”

“Everything.”

He looks up and he’s back. No tears. Just blood and rage and fear. It’s Lalna, in there, and it strikes you like a knife opening a wound. It’s not... ‘Lalnable’ or whatever it had been you’d told the fake (new) Honeydew. It was Lalna, plain and simple and very angry, grease on his face like he’s been in a workshop because that’s just how he’d been cloned.

“I remember everything.” In another life, he kills you then. In that moment he smashes through the room and just grasps you by the neck and lifts you up- the moment you stop caring he drops you but the impact, the snap of your neck against glass and pressed metal kills you anyway.

He sits at your grave for weeks afterwards, because of course without your iron-grip the facility was useless, and he sits where you’re buried on a sky-island, closer to the stars than anywhere else. 

Ridge tells you about it, when you ask, and he doesn’t see you for a long time afterward. You suspect that him meeting with the new improved version of yourself had unsettled him- he’d always been fond of watching humans ‘do moral things’.

You have never been human. And you’re starting to suspect you’ve never been that moral, either.

In this life, he doesn’t do anything of the sort, and in the absence of any real power, he just glowers at you.

You’d been clever. Muscle wastage and food deprivation worked wonders when all you needed was a functioning brain, not like the other one.)

“What happened to Rythian?” He spits it, like it’s acid and it’s burning him up from the inside out. 

You notice absently that that means you’ve overtaken even Rythian in Lalna’s hatred. 

“Suppose he’s under your _facility’_ s control too?” He sneers.

You think back to Rythian snapping in and out of cages and your desperate attempts to remove the End from him, to free him maybe, just so you could pretend to be moral for at least one of the thousands of dead. Right now his freed clone is in the Twilight Forest, not a threat and likely to never be one again.

“Yes. But not like you.” Because simple answers were better. 

“And Nano?” It’s less acidic and more bitterness, as if he can’t bear to keep it inside his head any longer. Not caustic, but deeper, far deeper. “She’s with you? or...” His face twists. “Is she with Ridge?”

You can’t answer that, so you don’t. Nanosounds had been… ah, _damaged_ by the time he’d got to her, seeds of flux and misfortune in her bones ready for the eventual purple swarm. Ridge had been thorough. Any clone you make of her slowly succumbs, and it is only the original set that seems to avoid slow death.

Ridge might hold power over him (though Project: God-Holding was working on it) but the hold he had over Nano stretched as far as the blood under her skin, and deeper.

Lalna scowls even further at your silence, because he has no time for you. Or rather, neither of you has time for the other. Lalna- this Lalna, not the one that was a loyal friend and valuable asset- probably spent his time plotting and thinking of ways to escape. You spent your time making your control absolute.

Absolute beneath Ridge. But again, you have a sneaking suspicion that YogLabs has gone so far that you might be able to kill him one day.

“Why do I remember? Are your standards slipping, Xephos?” 

Your face snaps back into steel and ice and diamond swords, because how dare he, when the labs were the only thing left, and would soon be the only thing left for everyone- You blink.

“Of course not. Don't flatter yourself with optimism, Lalna. My discretion is only going to keep you useful for so long.”

His laugh is choked and wet.

“Is that a threat, Spaceman?”

“Yes.”

And it is. And then you walk away. A million plans flash through your head- the cloning facility needs to be checked, the loosed clones need to be checked as well, your facility needs breach maintenance, and Rythian is in dire need of a check up because the Testificates probably aren't as efficient as they think.

But Rythian has to take precedence, because Lalna was clever, and maybe clever enough to outsmart you on his best days.

You don't want to go back to the clone vats just yet because that was hard and you are weak.

Too weak for this, at least. The corridors are too long and the marble too white, and your steps flood the space like a tsunami.

Employees find excuses to leave when you approach, and it is only your concentration on the sprawling layout of the Labs that lets them live. You find your way there eventually, going the long way up through Project: God-Holding and up into the End projects. 

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me, if you really want to after that whole thing, at finnlogan or verulamfic on Tumblr.
> 
> You are also allowed to send me an outraged message asking why I'm uploading old yogscast fic in 2020, but the only response I can give you is that I don't know and that I needed it out of my drafts folder.


End file.
